When we find that thing that distracts us from work or pulls us away from our diet, or keeps us in bed for an extra hour in the morning (snooze buttons!) we willingly get pulled away from our goal.
The snooze button doesn't press our finger, the car doesn't refuse to drive us to the gym, and Netflix doesn't descend from the heavens and autoplay against our will.
After begin distracted from the things I need to do, I get angry at myself as if I wasn't the one who opened that YouTube video, or browsed twitter for an hour, or found something else to distract me from my work. There is a part of me that thinks "if I can just block more of these websites I could get more work done!"
Wrong. The change does not come from the outside, the change comes from the inside. I make the choice to suffer the pain of self-discipline now or suffer the agony of regret later. At the moment, I choose instant gratification rather than foregoing entertainment now for the longterm success of my project. I should get angry at nobody but myself.
So that's it. This is more a post sending a message to myself. Sacrifice today and be proud of what you did today, tomorrow.
I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes ever by Lord Chesterfield:
“A MAN is fit for neither business nor pleasure, who either cannot, or does not, command and direct his attention to the present object, and in some degree, banish, for that time, all other objects from his thoughts. There is time enough for everything, in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once; but there is not time enough in the year if you will do two things at a time. This steady and undissipated attention to one object is a sure mark of a superior genius.”